Heartland Weekly – Relearning the Tax Cut Lesson

Billy Aouste is the new media specialist for The Heartland Institute. He is responsible for many projects at Heartland, including producing and managing social media outreach; pitching op-eds to print and digital publications; producing Heartland's weekly email; editing Heartland’s blog, the Freedom Pub; and tracking Heartland experts’ media hits.

Aouste is a graduate from DePaul University with a BA in Political Science. While studying he participated in the Fund for American Studies program in Washington D.C. Prior to joining Heartland in 2015, he was a staff intern on Bruce Rauner’s successful Illinois gubernatorial campaign. Aouste resides in Hainseville, Illinois.

If you don’t visit Freedom Pub and the Heartlander digital magazine every day, you’re missing out on some of the best news and commentary on liberty and free markets you can find. But worry not, freedom lovers! Heartland Weekly is here for you every Monday with a highlight show. Subscribe to the email today, and read this week’s edition below.

High Court Could Boost School Choice
Robert Holland, Detroit News
The nation’s two largest teacher unions staunchly oppose school choice, and have used money from the compulsory dues of their members to pressure Democratic Party politicians into blocking many of the educational options their constituents would like to have. This political spending has been nearly unlimited for more than 40 years, but a case currently before the U.S. Supreme Court might end that anti-choice gravy train for good. READ MORE

Trump, Rand Paul Come to the Rescue in New Health Care Executive Order
Justin Haskins, Townhall
Congress has repeatedly failed to pass legislation replacing Obamacare, despite congressional Republicans having promised to do for the past seven years. Thankfully, the White House, with help from Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), has decided to take health care reform into its own hands, announcing an executive order last week that could provide tremendous relief for millions of families who are currently forced to pay thousands of dollars for expensive health insurance policies. READ MORE

Relearning the Tax Cut Lesson
Peter Ferrara, Washington Times
Since President Reagan’s tax reforms of the 1980s, other countries around the world have been cutting their corporate tax rates and other taxes on businesses. As a result, American companies and their workers suffer today with the highest corporate tax rates and other business taxes in the developed world. What do these other countries understand that America does not? READ MORE

Featured Podcast: Pruitt Begins Rollback of the Clean Power Plan
Heartland Institute Research Fellow Sterling Burnett and Isaac Orr discuss the negative impact the Clean Power Plan – now defunct thanks to President Trump – would have had on the nation’s economy. The Clean Power Plan, they say, would have been enormously expensive and environmentally inconsequential. Estimates of the cost of compliance range from $8 billion to $39 billion per year. And for what? To avert 0.018 degrees C of potential future warming by 2100, an amount too small to be accurately measured. LISTEN TO MORE

America First Energy Conference
President Trump has already turned back years of Obama’s anti-energy policies, allowing the United States to once again emerge as a global energy leader. This is an amazing turn of events, one that would have been impossible had Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election. To discuss this remarkable moment in history, The Heartland Institute is gathering the country’s best energy policy experts, as well as key players in the industry, for the America First Energy Conference at the J.W. Marriott Galleria Hotel in Houston, Texas on Thursday, November 9, 2017. Join Heartland for an event that will explain what has happened, and more importantly, what comes next. REGISTER NOW

Will Global Warming Overflow the Chesapeake Bay?
Roger Bezdek, Heartland Policy Brief
The 2017 hurricane season hadn’t even drawn to a close and the floodwaters hadn’t receded before former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and others decided climate change was to blame. Clinton, for example, told a University of California audience on October 9: “We need to [acknowledge] climate change and the role that it plays in exacerbating such events.” You’ve heard that alleged connection made many times before. Trouble is, it’s just not true. Flooding problems in the Chesapeake Bay region— Maryland and Virginia in particular—are due not to climate-change-induced sea-level rise, but to land subsidence. READ MORE

At Least Ten Percent of Public School Kids Attend a Charter in More Than 200 Districts
Teresa Mull, School Choice Weekly
Charter school enrollment is on the rise, proving, once again, anything is better than traditional public schools. According to Chalkbeat, “Charter school enrollment is continuing to tick upward in cities across the country. And in 208 districts, at least 10 percent of public-school students attended a charter last school year.” If charters are attracting such droves of children, imagine what true choice – where innovation can truly thrive – would bring in the way of families! READ MORE

Climate Battlefront Comes to New Mexico Schools
H. Sterling Burnett, Climate Change Weekly
Despite early promises it would stand up for science, New Mexico’s Public Education Department has caved to climate alarmists and is adopting the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) in whole, including the standards’ false certainty humans are causing dangerous climate change. Schoolchildren in New Mexico and beyond deserve the truth. They can handle it. And on the causes and possible consequences of climate change, the scientific truth is there’s too much we just don’t know. READ MORE

Pampered Players Endanger Their Paychecks
S.T. Karnick, USA Today
It is axiomatic that National Football League players should stand respectfully as the national anthem is played before their games. I say this not as a political or moral judgment on their actions but as a simple observation about their self-interest. If the players continue their protests, it will not be long before they find themselves plying other trades at severely reduced wages. READ MORE

Bonus Podcast: Richard Innes: Common Core in Kentucky, the First State to Adopt the Flawed Standards
Heartland Institute Research Fellow Teresa Mull talks to Richard Innes, the education analyst for the Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions, about what the process was like for Kentucky to adopt the Common Core State Standards and what the outcome has been. Kentucky, like so many other states, adopted the standards sight-unseen, and has been suffering the consequences ever since. Kentucky’s legislature recently approved Senate Bill 1, which Innes explains is not the great repeal of Common Core many have been duped into believing it is. LISTEN TO MORE

How Trump Got the Economy Booming in Less Than a Year
Peter Ferrara, The Observer
President Donald Trump was elected because he effectively ran on restoring Ronald Reagan’s pro-growth economic policies: slashing tax rates, deregulation, and cutting government spending. Hillary contributed to his successful strategy by advocating keeping Barack Obama’s anti-growth policies intact, further convincing blue collar workers that Trump was their only hope. In Trump’s first six months in office, more than a million new jobs were created, driving unemployment down to a 16-year low, and the stock market set 34 new record highs. READ MORE

Heartland Institute Experts React to U.S. House Approving Senate Budget Blueprint
On Thursday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Senate’s budget resolution, which carves the path for a proposed tax bill that could save up to $1.5 trillion and – most importantly – would only require 50 votes to pass the Senate, circumventing any attempt at a filibuster. Said Heartland President Tim Huelskamp: “Last November the American people rejected the Washington establishment status quo. Today’s vote is a step forward toward ending that status quo and replacing it with real tax reform.” READ MORE

Talk With Heartland Experts!
You are cordially invited to participate in an exclusive monthly conference call for supporters who give $250 or more to The Heartland Institute. The first Wednesday of each month we will host a 20- to 30-minute call with a short presentation by one or more of Heartland’s senior staff.

Please RSVP to Gwendalyn Carver at 312/377-4000 or gcarver@heartland.org. You will receive dial-in information upon confirmation of your participation. DONATE HERE

Help Us Stop Wikipedia’s Lies!
Have you visited Heartland’s Wikipedia page recently? The good news is that it is more complete than it was just a couple months ago, after leftists took it over and trashed it. Most of the new information is accurate and unbiased. But the lies and libel about our positions on smoking and climate change remain. Other conservative and free-market sites suffer, too. Wikipedia refuses to make many of the changes we request and deletes and reverses the changes made by others. We need your help! READ MORE